Sacrament

'He's a fine man,' she said, 'and he's been very good to me over the years. I thought when my Donald passed away I'd never have another happy day. I thought the world was at an end. But you know, you get on with it, don't you? It was hard at first because I felt guilty, still living when he was gone. I thought: that's not right. But you get over that after a while. Hugo helped me. We'd sit and talk and he'd tell me to just enjoy the little things. Not try and understand what it was all about, because that was all a waste of time. It was funny that, coming from him. I always thought philosophers were sitting talking about the meaning of life, and there's Hugo saying don't waste your breath.'

'And that was good to hear, was it?'

'It helped,' she said. 'I started to enjoy the little things, the way he said. I was always working so hard when Donald was alive-

'You still work hard.'

'It's different now,' she said. 'If something doesn't get dusted, I don't fret about it. It's just dust. I'll be dust one of these days.'

'Have you got him to go to church?'

'I don't go any more.'

'You used to go twice on a Sunday.'

'I don't feel the need.'

'Did Hugo talk you into that?'

'I don't get talked into things,' Adele said, a little defensively.

'I didn't mean-'

'No, no, I know what you meant. Hugo's a godless man, and he always will be. But I saw the suffering my Donald went through. Terrible it was,terrible, to see him in such a state. And I know people say that's when your faith gets tested. Well, maybe mine did and it wasn't strong enough, because church never meant the same to me after that.'

'God let you down?'

'Donald was a good man. Not clever, like Hugo, but good in his heart. He deserved better.' She fell silent for a minute or so, then added a coda: 'We've got to make the most of what comes along, haven't we? There's nothing certain.'

CHAPTER VII

Will spent the rest of the evening with Thomas Simeon, burying himself in this other life as a refuge from his own. It was no use brooding on what had happened at the hospital; with a little distance (and a couple of heart to hearts with Adrianna) he'd be able to put the experiences in a sane perspective. For now, it was best ignored. He rolled a joint, pulled his chair over to the open window, and sat there reading, lulled by the spatter of the rain on the roof and sill.

He'd left off reading with Dwyer moving from occult waters, where she'd plainly been out of her depth, back into the relative comfort of simple biography. Simeon's ever-reliable friend Galloway reappeared at this juncture, having been moved by 'the commands of friendship' (what had gone on between these two? Will wondered) to separate Simeon from his patron, Rukenau, 'whose baleful influence could be seen in every part of Thomas's appearance and demeanour'. Galloway, it seems, had conspired to save Simeon's soul from Rukenau's clutches; an attempt which, by Dwyer's description, amounted to a physical abduction: 'Aided by two accomplices, Piers Varty and Edmund Maupertius, the latter a disenchanted and much embittered acolyte of Rukenau, Galloway plotted Simeon's "liberation" as he was later to describe it, with the kind of precision that befitted his military upbringing. It went without incident, apparently. Simeon was discovered in one of the upper rooms of Rukenau's mansion in Ludlow, where, according to Galloway: "We found him in a piteous state, his once radiant form much wasted. He would not be persuaded to leave, however, saying that the work he and Rukenau were doing together was too important to be left unfinished. I asked him what work this was, and he told us that the age of the Domus Mundi was coming to pass, and that he would be its witness and its chronicler, setting down its glories in paint that Popes and Kings might know how petty their business was, and putting aside their wars and machinations, make an everlasting peace. How will this be? I asked him. And he told me to look to his painting, for it was there all made plain. "

'Only one of these paintings was to be found, however, and it appears that Galloway took it with him when he and his fellow conspirators left. How they persuaded Simeon to leave with them is not reported, but it is evident that Rukenau made some attempt to get Simeon back and that Galloway made accusations against him that drove him into hiding. Whatever happened, Rukenau now disappears from this story, and Simeon's life - which has only a few years to run - takes one last extraordinary turn.'

Will took the chapter break to go downstairs and raid the fridge, but his mind remained in the strange world from which he'd just stepped. Nothing in the here and now - not the brewing of tea nor the making of a sandwich, not the din of raucous laughter from the television next door, nor the shrill delivery of the comedian who was earning it - could distract him from the images circling in his head. It helped that he'd seen Simeon with his own eyes, living and dead. He'd seen the desperate beauty of the man, which had so fixated Galloway that he'd ventured where his rational mind had little grasp, to pluck his friend from perdition. There was something sweetly romantic about the man's devotion to Simeon, who was plainly of another order of mind entirely. Galloway did not understand him, nor ever could, but that didn't matter. The bond between them was nothing to do with intellectual compatibility. Nor, all smutty suspicions aside, was this some unspoken homosexual romance. Galloway was Simeon's friend, and he would not see harm done to one he loved: it was as simple, and as moving, as that.

Will returned to the book with his sustenance, unnoticed by Adele, and settling back beside the window (having first closed it, the night-air was chilly) he picked up the tale where he'd left off. He knew, or at least thought he knew, how this story ended, with a body in a wood, pecked and chewed. But how did it arrive there? That was the substance of the thirty pages remaining.

Dwyer had kept the text relatively free of personal judgments so far, preferring to use other voices to comment on Rukenau, for instance, and even then scrupulously quoting both supporters and detractors. But now she showed her hand, and it was no stranger to the Communion rail.

'It is in these last years,' she wrote, 'recovering from the unholy influence of Gerard Rukenau, that we see the redemptive power of Simeon's vision at work. Chastened by his encounter with madness, he returned to his labours with his ambition curbed, only to discover that with all craving for a grand thaumaturgical scheme sated, his imagination flowered. In his later works, all of which were landscapes, the hand of the artist is in service of a greater Creation. The painting entitled "The Fertile Acre", though at first glance a melancholy night-pastoral, reveals a pageant of living farms when studied closely-'

Will flipped the page to the reproduction of the painting in question. It was far less strange than the Rukenau piece, at least at first glance: a sloping field, with rows of moon-sculpted sheaves receding from sight. But even in the much-degraded reproduction, Simeon's sly skills were in evidence. He'd secreted animals everywhere: in the sheaves, and the shadow of the sheaves, in the foliage on the oak tree, in the cloak of the harvester sleeping beneath the tree. Even in the speckled sky there were forms hidden, curled up like the sleeping children of the stars.

'Here,' Dwyer wrote, 'is a mellower Simeon, painting with almost child-like pleasure the secret life of the world: drawing us in to peer at his half-hidden bestiary.'

But there was more to the picture, Will sensed, than a visual game. There was an eerie air of expectation about the image; every living thing it contained (except for the exhausted harvester) in hiding; holding its breath as if in terror of some imminent deed.

Will returned to Dwyer's text for a moment, but she had taken her critique off on a hunt for painterly antecedents, and after a few sentences he gave up and returned to the reproduction for further study. What was it about the picture that so intrigued him? It would not have been remotely to his taste if he'd simply happened upon it, knowing nothing of the painter. It was far too coy, with its prettified animals peering out from their boltholes in the paint. Coy, and unnaturally neat: the corn in military array, the leaves in spiral bouquets. Nature wasn't like that. The most placid scene, examined by an unsentimental eye, revealed a ragged world of raw forms in bitter and unending conflict. And yet, he felt a kinship with the picture; as though he and its maker were, despite all evidence to the contrary, men of similar vision.